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Helena Kowalska was born on 25 August 1905 in Głogowiec, near Łódź in Poland, the third of ten children of a poor and religious family. From an early age she had a religious vocation, and she showed great determination in pursuing it despite the opposition of her parents and rejection by the first few convents to which she applied. Through persistence and hard work she was accepted by the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, which she entered on 1 August 1925, taking the name Sister Mary Faustina. She lived in the Congregation for the rest of her short life. Her work as cook, gardener and porter revealed nothing of her rich mystical interior life.

The mystery of the Mercy of God which forms the centre of St Faustina’s spirituality was revealed to her by Jesus in visions and conversations from early 1931. In choosing an obscure and uneducated young girl as the apostle of devotion to the Divine Mercy, he followed the pattern so often used by God: that his strength is manifested in weakness, and the weak and humble have the power to change the world. “Today I am sending you with my mercy to the people of the whole world. I do not want to punish aching mankind, but I desire to heal it, pressing it to my merciful heart.”

With the help of the nuns’ confessor, Father Michael Sopoćko (who prudently started by having Sister Faustina psychiatrically examined to confirm the veracity of the visions), the devotion to the Divine Mercy began. An image of the Divine mercy was painted at Sister Faustina’s instruction (since she could not paint herself); she wrote instructions for a Novena of the Divine Mercy, which was published in the final year of her life. Sister Faustina died (probably of tuberculosis) on 5 October 1938.

The devotion to the Divine Mercy spread widely and fast, especially during the Second World War. In 1956 Pope Pius XII blessed an image of the Divine Mercy, but the theorists were harder to convince, and although the process of Faustina’s canonization began in 1965, it was not until 1978 that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reversed its previous ban on the circulation of her writings: “…there no longer exists, on the part of this Sacred Congregation, any impediment to the spreading of the devotion to The Divine Mercy”. Indeed, on the official Vatican web site some of Faustina’s actual conversations with Jesus are quoted in her biography, and there have been moves to have her declared a Doctor of the Church.

Faustina Kowalska was beatified on 18 April 1993 and canonized on 30 April 2000. At the same time the second Sunday of Easter was officially designated as the Sunday of the Divine Mercy.

Other saints: Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos (1819 - 1867)

United States

He was born in Füssen, in Bavaria, in what is now Germany, on 11 January 1819. He entered the diocesan seminary. Coming to know the charism of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, joined it and was sent to North America. He was ordained a priest in 1844.

He began his pastoral ministry in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as assistant pastor of his confrère St John Neumann, serving also as Master of Novices and dedicating himself to preaching. He became a full-time itinerant missionary preacher, preaching in both English and German in a number of different states. He died in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 4 October 1867.

About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:

Second Reading: Pseudo-Ambrosius

The writings of the Fathers do from time to time contain works attributed to pseudo-characters such as Pseudo-Athanasius or Pseudo-Hippolytus. Very occasionally this is because the author in question has deliberately used the name of someone else, such as the late 5th-century writer who used the name “Dionysius the Areopagite”, after St Paul’s convert in the Acts of the Apostles. But more often it is just a question of an early attribution successfully challenged by later scholars, coupled with the understandable question “So what else can we call him?” This is the case with Pseudo-Ambrosius, or “Ambrosiaster”, whose writings used to be part of the works of Ambrose of Milan, and were copied alongside them, until the scholarship of the early Renaissance successfully challenged the attribution. When, in the world of art, this sort of thing happens to paintings, the work in question tends to descend into obscurity, but in the case of pseudo-Ambrose his written works were worth keeping even if we no longer had any idea who wrote them.

Pseudo-Ambrose’s commentary on St Paul’s epistles was written during the papacy of Pope Damasus I, which puts it between 366 and 384. Students of the text of the Bible find it useful because it quotes a version of the Latin text earlier than the Vulgate. But it has a value beyond this, as a clear and succinct work of exegesis.

Liturgical colour: green

The theological virtue of hope is symbolized by the colour green, just as the burning fire of love is symbolized by red. Green is the colour of growing things, and hope, like them, is always new and always fresh. Liturgically, green is the colour of Ordinary Time, the season in which we are being neither especially penitent (in purple) nor overwhelmingly joyful (in white).

Death was not God’s doing, he takes no pleasure in the extinction of the living. To be – for this he created all; the world’s created things have health in them, in them no fatal poison can be found, and Hades holds no power on earth; for virtue is undying.